Unaware of clocks

Waking on a Saturday

Without alarm

Unaware of clocks

An absence of sounds

The children are making

In another house

My arm is sprawled

Across a wide bed where

Their mother. Their mother

Is listening to giggles

The way the eyes grow wide

I hear a finger

Scratching the bedsheet

And echoes of cupboards

Wrappers and bowls, how

Ben Ben entered kiss-first

In other words…

Their mother was called

My wife and the house fell silent

With a fruit basket of decisions

And peering into memory

Wide as an old bed

That served a purpose

Upon waking, eyes as slits

When the silence cries

On a Saturday morning

Ever find something that frightens you?

Finding Something in the Middle of an Intersection

I put it in reverse

Leave the engine running

Door open to the street

I thought it had a face

Was carved in wood

And sure enough

Hand wrought

Its face is charred

Black as a secret

Dropped by mistake?

From a bad accident?

Tossed for a reason?

From Tahiti, Bora Bora

Tourist trinket or folk art

I wonder, gripping it

Like a lucky find

What we get when

We have lived well

But I wonder

If that is true

What the thing means

Hands full of charge

And charcoal  

Face full of apparition

Why in the intersection

Of my crossing

Staring up at me?

Compelled to bury it

At some distance

And just forget

Throw it down

A pit at some depth

None too deep

But I hold onto it

Once in a while grasp

It in the bath

Keep the spirits tilting

Torrid and piquant

To wonder, to incant 

An anti-tribute to Gawd

Tell Me Your Secrets, Gawd

Gawd, tell me the secrets that are tucked into your flowy tunic

The number of dots on a Ritz cracker and why my phone calls

Unusual people and the wretched visit knocking when I tuck in?

How too I am losing charge--charge it’s called, credit--how I owe

The more I give, and why the door slams and how television

Stole my soul, steals my sons’ souls, sits there silently, blank

Gawd, answer me this, magic beggar, destroyer Shiva, where

Do I go when I leave the house every morning with my bag

Of cures and scents to give credit and scores at the shrine?

Gawd, tell me the secrets snarled into your beard of time

Blank Gawd, how you torment the children with your shiny bells

How their prayers fail, when they lay ashake in their sheets

Apiss on so much black ink on the last pages of your firey tracts

Dear Gawd, aloof with your autoharp and choirs of deadmen

Tell me the secrets cupped snug in your many impish hands

Dear Gods, Disney, Da Vinci and Dalí

Dear Gods, 

        Disney, Da Vinci and Dalí

One. Where Mickey is swept by floodwaters into space

On his broom, swooping and sweeping stardust

Two. How the rendered ochre pages dreaming the blades

For whirling and lifting man from earth into heavens

Three. When stones and sky caress an island breast aiming

Beyond canvass toward Halloween and you are there

Disney, Da Vinci, Dalí.  America, Italia, España

Swooping fervor, aiming cognition, whirling trinity

Walt, Leonardo, Salvadór.  Man, uomo, hombre

Pioneering high priests, inured magicians and stand-ups

Iconoclastic ghosts hurling between unknown planets

Buried still and blurred amid the milky distances

Unshelved models for a cerebral universe, swelling

Black as it is, as we breath, breath when alive

Alive, provoking subatomic and pulsating galactic

Emerging like laughter, plumes of spilled design

Dear gods, Disney, Da Vinci and Dalí

Thank you, grazie, gracias, dear gods

Amen